Mint

I see Mint as the more reasonable option that keeps 98% of the advantages of Ubuntu, with less of the crazy. I was a xubuntu user a decade ago, but have been very happy with Mint xfce since I switched.

Thanks for the rec! I also love that you presume that there will be a next time, cuz, uh, that’s accurate. These little boxes are powerhouses, I probably want one for a TV set-top box now that all the TV boxes (Roku, Amazon Fire, even Android TV and soon Apple TV) are riddled with ads.

Beelink and Minisforum are legit

I wish I knew a lot of this when I first started shopping for a mini PC. I ended up with a Beelink model that I’m quite happy with, but it seems almost luck that I didn’t pick another one, and I would have liked a “reputable brand” search function.

Kinda, there was a progression to travel to different planets, etc. I mostly played it with friends and messed around, so I didn’t pursue it very far.

Bob Hoskins, though I admit, my decision is partly colored by his many other awesome roles.

Anti-Cheat is a bitch

Seriously, I don’t know how this one is solvable, to be honest, without major investment and support from the game companies themselves.

performance issues are definitely not universal

Agreed!

Don’t @ me too hard, but I think @luciferofastora has some good points on sound and anti-cheat. They don’t affect me, mostly because I don’t like PVP games that need anti-cheat, but they represent a huge chunk of the market and I do wish they worked better on Linux. I’m fully on Linux for my daily driver and generally have good experiences, I’m not even considering going back to Windows, I just wish things worked better for everyone.

It looks quite usable, to be honest. I would have loved to use it back then.

I’ll have to give that one a try!

Pax Imperia: Eminent Domain. Quite a learning curve, but I loved the different ways you can win (conquest, trade, black ops) and how much you could customize your ships or pick unique races with tolerances for different planets.

Game strategy advice for a 30+ year old game? I love this so much, you guys are awesome.

omg YES. Nothing I have found since then has quite scratched the same itch of flying around with a friend on some random dude’s server. So much fun!

Puppy was going to me my suggestion too, before I read that you’d already used it. Maybe try some of the other versions? If you used a Debian- or Ubuntu-based Puppy, you could try a Slack-based one, or vice-versa. Puppy’s organization is a little confusing, in my opinion, but it does give a user some options. You also might try some of the “puplets” that aren’t official Puppy distros but are part of the Puppy family.

https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/family-tree.html

I’m fine with this, particularly since you can just tick the box and still access them. Linux Mint is such a good gateway for new Linux users, it makes sense to hide unverified flatpaks until they understand the risks. Plenty of people (perhaps myself included) won’t ever need to worry about unverified flatpacks if their needs are simple and they don’t add much beyond the standard software.

It is fairly short, but at $25USD, it was priced reasonably enough that I didn’t feel cheated. And frankly, I don’t have time for very long games, I really can only manage short games, so it works out well for me.

Little Kitty Big City, which is some great, silly fun.

Mint

I definitely found Linux Mint the easiest version to switch to, coming from Windows. All the menus and icons were basically where I expected to find them. I couldn’t have cared less about Wayland support, I just wanted to do basic tasks and for my printer to work, and Mint did that out of the box.

I played quite a bit of Tricky and SSX3 in college, I should dust off the GameCube and fire it up again.

Honestly, this is good advice. It’s much better to keep personal computer activity on a personal device, whether that’s on a ThinkPad or anything else.

I hope they focus on the fun. With that pedigree of devs, I think they’ll get the balance good and have good maps, but that illusive fun factor needs to be there. (Like what the Torchlight devs did after some left the Diablo teams.)